The winds of fortune were still at his back. He had escaped the deadly throng unharmed, and now there was another stroke of luck—the window had still not been fixed.
There was one terrifying moment when he tried to pull himself up by the window frame, and it wobbled unsteadily, as if it might fall off. But he didn’t plunge to his death: He made it onto the broad windowsill and scrambled inside. But another surprise lay in wait for him. The attic was locked, with a new big padlock dangling from hasps so sturdy he would never be able to break them off without special tools.
But the building was an odd design, and the windows in the main stairwell faced in two directions: on the third floor they looked onto the courtyard, and on the second and fourth, onto the street. Ilya went down to the fourth floor and peered out at the street. It looked like a black river. The heads on the surface of this river looked like curly clumps of fur, and they undulated and stirred like the pelt of some dreadful beast. Ilya got out his camera. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to get a good shot from this distance, so he decided to take it from the second floor. On the second floor he was able to open the window. From below he heard a sound that was not so much screaming as a rhythmic howling, punctuated with piercing shrieks and cries. From this vantage point the crowd no longer resembled a living pelt. The heads were like dark stones pressed tightly together. They oscillated in place, moving to and fro, locked in rhythm, but unable to gain any momentum and break free. It was a road of living cobblestones dancing in place.
Ilya took a few photographs, then decided that it would be more effective after all if he took them from the fourth floor. He had already gotten over his recent scare.
Suddenly, a drunken woman in a red housecoat poked her head out of an apartment and barked, “What’s going on? You got nothin’ better to do?”
She reinforced her indignation with a string of curses. Ilya was at a loss for words.
He was clever, so he didn’t bother to answer her back, but gestured to his mouth and waved his hands around his ears, as though he were a deaf-mute. The woman spat in disgust and turned away.
On the fourth floor, Ilya used up almost all his film, and started thinking about trying to head home. It was clear to him that his usual route up Rozhdestvensky Boulevard from Trubnaya Square, then crossing Sretenka and coming out on Chistoprudny, was impossible. But he thought that if he were able to push through the crowd on the square and make it to the other side, it might be easier. He had no way of knowing that the crowd was streaming down Rozhdestvensky to Trubnaya Square, where it collided head-on with the living human current emerging from Petrovsky Boulevard, forming a giant, deadly whirlpool.
He had no intention of holing up in this building forever, though, and his mother was already no doubt frantic with worry. He sat there on the windowsill a little while longer, wondering whether he should use up the last of his film now, since the light was fading, or save a few shots for later. Then he got sick of sitting and decided to get out of there, no matter what.
It was even harder to get out of the courtyard than it had been to get in. But he made all the right moves: he rang the doorbell of an apartment on the first floor and asked the resident, an old man, to let him exit through the other door, and thus reach the street. The old man shook his head, and struggled to explain, through inarticulate moans and gestures, that the front entrance was locked, but that he could go out through the boiler room.
This old guy isn’t just pretending to be a deaf-mute. Ilya laughed to himself, always amused by coincidences of this kind. The courtyard was completely deserted, but through the walls he could hear the dull but mighty roar of the compressed horde. Ilya saw the boiler room, but discovered it was locked. He went around it to the other side and climbed onto the roof, then scrambled up to the top of the outside wall and leapt down onto a stretch of cordoned-off sidewalk. Now he had to slip through the military cordon to blend into the crowd. He ran a ways to get nearer to the intersection, and slid between two soldiers onto the pavement packed with people. He understood immediately that he had made a mistake; he should never have left the building where he had taken cover. He was dragged off by an unremitting force, like the undertow in a great ocean. The traffic light was blinking up ahead.
Now Ilya became truly paralyzed with fear: he was afraid not for his Fedya, which might be smashed to smithereens against the pole of the stoplight, but for what might happen to his own head. He wasn’t even able to move his hands, which were trying to shield the camera from blows. The camera was pressing hard into his stomach. He felt no pain, but rather a terrible despair. He was carried along toward the traffic light, and just to the left of it. A man with a crushed face was pressed up against the pole. He was dead, but there was no room for him to fall down.
Suddenly, the ground under Ilya’s feet shuddered and opened up. He plummeted into a sewer—the manhole cover had given way under the trampling feet of the crowd. Ilya made a soft landing on top of a roll of oakum left behind by a water department crew. To his left was a grate, one side of which was slightly ajar. Ilya pulled, and it opened completely. He stuffed himself into this little burrow, and for some reason closed the grate behind him. This instinctive motion saved his life. People kept falling into the sewer after him for several minutes, until it was crammed to the top with bodies; as the one on the very bottom of the pile, he would certainly have suffocated. The bodies of the others were compressed so tightly and compactly that the thousands of people trampling over them had no idea they were walking on human flesh. Inside his burrow, he heard their screams.
Meanwhile, aboveground, a monstrous, invisible wave suddenly swept everyone off, hurling them against walls and barriers, into the sides of trucks, and against the chain of trolleybuses. The guards had opened a passage leading into the depths of a closed-off area, and people assumed that they were finally about to escape to safety, somewhere beyond the bone-crushing pressure. Ilya saw none of this. In fact, he saw nothing at all. It was pitch-dark.
Ilya lay in his dark burrow for what seemed a long time, then began groping the walls. He discovered a large pipe leading slightly downward. He started to crawl along it. He crawled and crawled, and then the pipe made a slight turn and started leading upward. He had wrapped his camera in his woolen cap and stuffed it under his belt. After some time, he paused and slept a little while, and when the bitter cold forced him awake, he couldn’t remember right away how he had come to be in this dank hole. He lifted up his head and saw a large, rectangular grate about six feet above him. It wasn’t that there was light on the other side—just that the darkness there was not as thick. He was terribly thirsty. The stench was foul, but not from sewage; it smelled of rusty iron and rats. He didn’t see any rats, though—they must have been running in a dense mass toward the Hall of Columns, too.
He had to get out of there. Thin, ladder-like iron brackets jutted out from the vaulted walls leading up to the grate above his head, and he began to climb. He made it to the top with ease, but the grate turned out to be welded shut. He couldn’t possibly force it open to get through. He descended again, curled into a little ball, and fell asleep. When he woke up, the light from above seemed stronger. He moved farther along the pipe—it grew wider.
He came to another grate, about fifty yards from the first. He felt around for the brackets and began to clamber up them. The grate wasn’t welded shut this time; it was secured fairly loosely, but there was a lock on the outside. Ilya kept going. The grates appeared at regular intervals, fifty yards or so apart. He passed eight of them, investigated each one, and found that almost all of them were welded shut, except for two, with locks on the outside. Soon he lost count. He dropped off to sleep several more times from exhaustion, woke up, then kept going.